Month: March 2008

There’s an interesting debate developing about how we manage our digital self. With the increase in social sites; think Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, Last.FM, Delicious, etc… your social map is probably growing faster than you think.

It raises interesting questions about privacy and who owns your data. Do you really want all your data aggregated by third parties, or do you prefer a centralised self.

Process is something that we talk a lot about at glue. People have wildly varying views about what’s right and what’s not. How to draw the line between the end result and the amount of ££ you spend getting there often depends which department you work in.

Apple are famous for their great hardware and software design, and in a presentation at SXSW from Michael Lopp, senior engineering manager at Apple, revealed a few details about their take on the idea.

Pixel Perfect Mockups

This, Lopp admitted, causes a huge amount of work and takes an enormous amount of time. But, he added, “it removes all ambiguity.” That might add time up front, but it removes the need to correct mistakes later on.

10 to 3 to 1

Apple designers come up with 10 entirely different mock ups of any new feature. Not, Lopp said, “seven in order to make three look good”, which seems to be a fairly standard practice elsewhere. They’ll take ten, and give themselves room to design without restriction. Later they whittle that number to three, spend more months on those three and then finally end up with one strong decision.

Paired Design Meetings

This was really interesting. Every week, the teams have two meetings. One in which to brainstorm, to forget about constraints and think freely. As Lopp put it: to “go crazy”. Then they also hold a production meeting, an entirely separate but equally regular meeting which is the other’s antithesis. Here, the designers and engineers are required to nail everything down, to work out how this crazy idea might actually work. This process and organization continues throughout the development of any app, though of course the balance shifts as the app progresses. But keeping an option for creative thought even at a late stage is really smart.

Pony Meeting

This refers to a story Lopp told earlier in the session, in which he described the process of a senior manager outlining what they wanted from any new application: “I want WYSIWYG… I want it to support major browsers… I want it to reflect the spirit of the company.” Or, as Lopp put it: “I want a pony!” He added: “Who doesn’t? A pony is gorgeous!” The problem, he said, is that these people are describing what they think they want. And even if they’re misguided, they, as the ones signing the checks, really cannot be ignored.

The solution, he described, is to take the best ideas from the paired design meetings and present those to leadership, who might just decide that some of those ideas are, in fact, their longed-for ponies. In this way, the ponies morph into deliverables. And the C-suite, who are quite reasonable in wanting to know what designers are up to, and absolutely entitled to want to have a say in what’s going on, are involved and included. And that helps to ensure that there are no nasty mistakes down the line.

Just watch the first minute or so of the above clip, a Brits broadcast from online entertainment channel ITN. As product placement goes, you might think that Will Ferrell’s new film, Semi-Pro, had lucked in.

Well, no. All of these references to Semi-Pro were actually added in to the broadcast digitally and, according to MirriAd who are behind the work, this is a first for “embedded advertising in showbiz content”.

I’m not sure I like the idea of advertising mixed with content in such a way, especially when the viewer doesn’t know or understand whats happening.

MirriAd’s technology allows any video to be automatically scanned for suitable advertising zones. These zones are then tracked frame by frame for the duration that they are visible, being tracked for motion, blur and brightness for every pixel within the frame.